Wednesday, March 13, 2013

The Hill Cantons Wilderness Crawl

Spring Break has my fantasy creative
writing class all canceled, so I am going to play hooky and run the beginnings of a new mini-campaign tomorrow.

Particulars
1. New characters to be rolled
as per the HC Compendium and the draft version of Live Weird or
Die.

2. Each session will have to end back in town
or at a "save point" (a safe, habitable spot in the wilds
that I will indicate as you discover them). New sessions can begin at
any of the locales a PC ends at.

3. It's all about the
blank hex map. In fact you will have a standing (paying) commission
to survey and explore the land. Following up on your own personal El
Dorados and the like of course is encouraged.

4. The
action will take place just off the eastern border of the Overkingdom
(to the north and east of the Hill Cantons proper), so expect some
tie-in and recycling from the campaign.

Background Whoha

Countless centuries of gavelkind
succession laws have cranked up the fractionalizing, autarkic,
hair-splitting pettiness—so typical of life in places with a foot
in the Weird--to a feverish pitch in the Translittoral Canton of
Hoimatbuch. That chilly, windy easternmost bastion of the Overkingdom
is further plagued by a strangely-virile nobility creating a
maddening over-proliferation of hyphen-crazy micro-fiefdoms as each
holding is divided equally among the male children of each line.

Matters have come to what seems a
breaking point with the death of the Vastvoj the Viscous, the
Wildgraf of Velky Hoimatbuch-Voka-Untmuntschaifen--at least in the
mind of Jakov XXXIV the newly-anointed Sub-Wildgraf of Velky
Hoimatbuch-Voka-Untmuntschaifen-Ujzed, a lordly domain comprised of a single blood-apricot orchard, giant-bat pasturage/fertilizer lot (shared
with his brother-lord) and a decrepit hunting lodge located near the
dread Pass of Sighs.

The rakish Jakov, known for his
scandalous and calculatedly provocative views while at college in
Marlankh, has a decidely more ambitious plan for avoiding the slow,
slumbering idiocy of declining rural gentry life—expansion and
exploration of the Weird beyond the Pass. He has put out a call for
the usual rough and tumble sort of freebooters, border ruffians,
sybarites, raving heretics and others to map and survey the
wilderness to the east.

Jakov offers the following:

30 gold suns for each
hexagonally-organized 21.6 square mile area unit of land--quaintly
referred to as “five mile hexes” by laymen—accurately mapped.

100 suns for each settlement of
sentient (preferably exploitable) life found. (Generous bonuses for
maps of said sites to be paid according to detail.)

A variable bounty for sites of
“particular, unusual interest”.

Use of his paid-up membership in
the local hiring hall of Golden Guild of Condotierre, Linkboys,
Roustabouts, and Stevedores located in the nearby town of Velky
Hoimatbuch.

Room and board when you are back
in the Lodge.

Scale is 5 miles to a hex. Click to Enlarge.

Hireling offerings for the Guild
(contract period for one session only):

One general inspiration is Jeff Rient's abortive Mormon wilderness crawl that I managed to get in on. He had a punitive mechanism about becoming lost in the wilds if you didn't make it back to a safe spot (and boy did you an incentive to do so.)

Great ideas here, thanks! My OD&D campaign already uses the idea of a home base where they get free room and board since they all start out as indentureds... but I like the idea of paying them to map additional hexes, and while I've required them to return to Milburn Hall at the end of every game, I ought to figure out some additional safe zones as well.

I'll use this opportunity to say again that in the HC pdf, it makes reference to the Death and Dismemberment table in the Appendices...and I can't find one. Was it left out? Am I stupid? Please note that these are not mutually exclusive.

I rolled a character as well that I doubtless will never use because I don't have any spare time.